Geekdom

Ohman… it is morning and I am legitimately typing a blog post like I am supposed to on a weekend!  Apologies again for the huge lag in getting yesterdays post out the door.  Unfortunately from time to time I get busy… and I really don’t like pre-writing a post very much and setting an embargo date.  I tend to keep my blog posts fresh and reactional in that I just blather on about whatever happens to be in my mind at the time.  I can tell that this is not everyone’s cup of tea as my subscriber base has pretty much been stable and unchanging for some time now.

I Love my Grandma

The title of this sub-section will make absolutely no sense to anyone…  but I am chuckling immensely.  Dates back to High School Spanish 2… when I kid pestered me for a translation of what was written on the board.  I told him it was “I love my grandma” and I don’t remember what it was honest at this point… only that I told him a completely laughable translation.  Sure enough the little slacker got called on to provide the translation, and he proudly strode to the front of the class with all the cocky confidence you would expect of someone who was dead certain of the answer.  He delivered his response and immediately riotous laughter spread throughout the room.  I just shrugged and said “you should do your own translations from now on, my Spanish is a bit rusty”.

Though I really and truly do love my grandma… and this week was her 84th birthday.  We had all intentions of going up on Wednesday night to see her, but for starters my wife got home extremely late from work that night.  After calling up she was not feeling great after having oral surgery the day before, so we opted just to talk to her for a bit on the phone and come up Saturday to see her.  The above card is me being bored while waiting on my wife and freehanding something with a bunch of sharpies. I thought it turned out fairly well and Grandma seemed to like it.

We went up yesterday and hung out with her for about an hour or so before my parents arrived, which lead us to spend another hour or so catching up with them.  She is looking pretty good and my mother took the opportunity as always to take a large number of photos.  We have finally weaned her off using a standalone point and shoot camera and just taking photos with her Galaxy S4.  Cool thing about that is it let us grab her phone and text the best of them to ourselves.  I have to say they are some of the best family style photos we have had in awhile.  I would post them, but I am not sure if I am quite ready to post photos of myself online.

Gallivanting

After leaving my grandmothers, we set out on a cross country trip of some hardcore gallivanting.  Essentially from my hometown we went over to Bartlesville first.  Recently all of the stores surrounding us have had some massive clearance sales, which I think are essentially the “lets clear everything out so we can stock up for christmas” sales.  So far we have found all sorts of things, namely school supplies and Legos.  Since we really had no plans yesterday we decided to roam around the surrounding area checking various stores… namely all the different Wal-mart super centers.

It has admittedly been a really long time since I have spent much time in a Wal-mart store.  Like I will pop in and get ONE thing at a time, that only they carry… but I have not really spent a ton of time “shopping” in one for some time.  We saw several funny things along the trip yesterday that I just have to share.  Firstly is the image at the beginning of this section.  Apparently you can get a wedding set at Wal-mart for around 10 dollars.  They are as fake as is humanly possible… but at first glance they totally pass as the real thing.  I didn’t even know that was a market, that folks needed cheap fake rings… but apparently like always they are filling a perceived need.

Next up over right justified we have the adult women’s… super girl footie pajamas.  Just not the type of thing I expected to exist at all… let along be proudly displayed for sale at the local Wal-mart.  The funny thing is they come with a little velcro cape that attaches to the back.  The best ones I didn’t see until later in the day at another store, were the batgirl pajamas.  I tried to convince my wife to buy a pair.  I could totally see her loving a pair of footie pajamas… but she thought they would simply be too damned hard to get out of when she needed to pee in the middle of the night.  Probably best to air on the side of caution there.

Half a Tank of Gas

The above image is a screen cap of the route we took yesterday.  Nowata to Bartlesville to Muskogee to Wagoner to Pryor to Claremore and finally back to Owasso.  We ended up burning through half a tank of gas, and hit a ton of stops between.  Did we find much of anything in the grand scheme of things?  Not really… but it is mostly the thrill of the hunt.  The entire event started in part because a few weeks back we had found all sorts of cool stuff at the clearance section of the Muskogee Wal-mart.  I had opted not to pick a few things up, as had my wife and we had been kicking ourselves ever since.  So from Bartlesville we decided to head over to Muskogee and see if they still had it. 

I have to say we struck out 110%, because not only did they not have what we were wanting… they had zero signs of ever having this massive clearance section in the first place.  I wandered around the store trying to find any place it could have gone… but I am guessing more than likely after two weeks they had shipped it all off to be written off by Wal-mart… which is essentially how Sooner Surplus gets all its stuff.  While we were in town we ran by there as well, but there was nothing really new to look at, and since we didn’t need mens suit coats or scooters… their newest acquisitions… we went on our merry way.  It was at this point we got the brainstorm to meander our way back to Owasso through all the towns along the way.

What was fueling my wife in this endevour is visions of school supplies dancing in her head.  Friday night we had to run out to the Owasso Wal-mart for something… and back in the home and garden section they had all of their back to school leftovers piled up in a huge heap and discounted down to truly silly prices.  As a result we ended up with 20 index card boxes for 10 cents each, 40 plastic rulers for 10 cents each, 6 packages of her favorite flair clone markers for a quarter a piece, 11 really nice 8 pocket file folders for a quarter a piece, misc notebooks for around a quarter, gluesticks 4 for a quarter, and a really nifty storage ottoman for the loft for 5 bucks.  All told we walked away with a massive amount of stuff for less than 40 bucks.

Quality not Quantity

While I did not necessarily find a huge stockpile of stuff in our trip, I did find some definitely awesome items.  Friday night at Target I did one of my routine trips through toys to look for clearance, and found they finally marked down the Fury starfighter from Star Wars the Old Republic.  This is the one that comes with the Darth Malgus mini-figure and is the same star ship that Sith Inquisitors and Warriors pilot in the game.  Of all of the Lego sets that have been on the market, this is hands down the one I have wanted the most.  The problem is it debuted for like $120 and there was no way in hell I would ever purchase that.  However target had it marked down to $60… so I snapped that puppy up.

While on our whirlwind trip of Wal-mart clearance, I did encounter one really nice thing in Wagoner.  When the Hobbit movie sets were released, the on that I knew I immediately had to have was the Unexpected Meeting set that included a model of Bags End.  I have always loved Hobbit architecture and the Baubleshire was hands down my favorite area of Everquest 2.  So since a Hobbit hole existed… I had to have it.  This set originally debuted at around $60, and Wal-mart had it marked down to $25 so it was a completely no brainer to pick it up for that.

So while I did not find a large volume of sets, I got two of the ones that I had been wanting the most, so I call our half tank of gas a complete success.  My wife on the other hand picked up a handful of things, included several scarves that she had been hunting for at the Claremore Wal-mart.  The thing we keep marveling at is just how grossly inefficient the pricing is.  We would see the exact same product on clearance at three stores… and in each case it would be a completely different price.  There were several cases where we might have picked an item up at another store… had it been priced the same way it was at a previous store.  I remember seeing the same action figured priced for $7, $5, and $4 at three different stores in the clearance bin.

I am assuming this is because each store has a certain amount of autonomy in their pricing practices.  However as a consumer, I find it all a frustrating mess.  Granted I am likely exploiting the hell out of these practices by hitting multiple stores in the same day and sampling the best prices at each.  I just find it humorous that I never see this level of chaos at say a Target, where everything is marked down in a neat and orderly fashion based on a specific  patterned schedule.  If you see something for sale at one store, you can go to any store in your area and are almost always going to find it the same price.

Wrapping Up

Even though we did not necessarily find a ton of items, we had a fun time wandering around the state looking for things.  It was a nice drive, we just wish we had brought our cameras for it.  Today on the other hand I hope we pretty much just chill out close to home.  My allergies are still killing me, especially after being exposed to that much “outside” along the tip.  I am just about to get up and take something, and hopefully that will make things better.  I hope you all have had a great weekend and that you have a good start to the work week.

Good evening my dear readers… I am writing this far later in the day than normal… but there was good reason.  Essentially today we greatly varied our normal weekend routine.  Towards the end of the week my wife suggested we go to Muskogee today, and I suggested that we just get up early, shower and eat breakfast on the road.  It has been in the hundreds temperature wise in Oklahoma this week, so I thought it would be better to get up there and back before it heated up too badly.  Instead we ended up spending the entire day there, but we found a lot of spiffy things.

Awesome Wife

A few weeks back I wrote about my wife and how amazing she was when she spontaneously got me a huge haul of Legos when she went off on a shopping excursion with some of her friends.  Well today was the last day of the big sale that she found them on… and she wanted to know if I wanted to make a trip up to see if there was anything else I wanted.  Firstly I thought it was amazing that she was offering to make a trip to Muskogee just to go Lego shopping for me…  but it gets better.  When she was there early, she had told me that the place was not air conditioned and that if we ever made a trip back… that we would want to go early in the day.

As a result that is what is leading me to blog so late, as we pretty much were on the road as soon as we woke up this morning with no real time for me to knock out a morning post.  During the day she was there she had texted me pictures of the various sets she found, but I really did not get a good feeling for what the store was like.  We made a trip to the one in west Tulsa, and everything there was pretty much in neat and organized rows like a closeout store.  Additionally that store was air conditioned…  so I really could not grasp just how hot and oppressive the Muskogee store would be.

Above and Beyond

The above picture is of what I would consider the most organized section of Sooner Surplus.  The various toys were scattered around throughout the store over the course of six different isles.  In each isle there were legos mixed in, crammed back behind… above and under all the rest of the toys.  Essentially Sooner Surplus is what appears to be a store that buys items that the stores like Wal-mart write off as a loss.  The end result is a complete mishmash of everything you could imagine.  All of it in new or like new state… sometimes with dented packages but everything around sixty percent of retail prices.  For example the TIE Fighter she got me last time retails for $55 and the pricetag at the store was $35.

Until August 31st… aka today all of the toys, Legos included were an additional 20% off the already 60% pricetag.  So first off I was completely floored that she thought about the Legos in the first place… but as I rummaged through the shelves today I finally grasped just how amazing she really was.  The various sets the gathered up last time… came from about 12 different places in the store… some of them buried behind piles of other toys.  So not only was she thinking about me when she saw the Legos… she went through a massive amount of physical effort to FIND all the sets in the first place.  All of this in during an Oklahoma afternoon, in a metal building with no air-conditioning that seems to heat up like an oven really quickly.

A Real Trooper

So after picking me out almost $100 in Lego sets last time… she was more than willing to bring me back today and let me pick through the sets myself.  This time around we got a lot of the larger sets.  Granted in the above picture, one of the sets came from closeout in our Wal-Mart… but she still was amazing about letting me pick that one up as well.  The Goblin King set above, was roughly $60 before the 20% discount… and it originally retailed in the store for over $100 by itself.  The monster train set was roughly $40 and retailed for over $80 in the store. So all in all I found a ton of really good bigger sets for super cheap even before the discount… but knowing that we got an additional 20% off of everything was a huge push to pick them up.

The Optimus Prime set is Kree-o but everything I have seen shows that they are completely compatible with Lego.  It originally retailed for $80 and before the 20% discount the above set was $20.  Granted I don’t think the Kree-o product line has gone over as well as Hasbro could have hoped, but it still looks awesome, and had a ton of pieces.  The set I had gotten from Wal-mart before was also originally in the $100 range, but we picked it up I think for $45.  Essentially all told between the set from Wal-mart and the finds today at Sooner Surplus… my wife was a real trooper about me spending another $200 on Legos.

While we were there we found a few more sets for my niece and nephew.  The big thing we were excited about is that we found another three sets from the Lego Friends line for her… and then got a really cool bigger dump truck set for him.  Granted this pales in comparison to what I walked away with, but I am sure they will be happy when we give them to them.  We went by the Wal-mart in Muskogee later and they had quite a few sets on clearance as well.  I passed on a Hobbit Attack of the Wargs set for $20 without looking it up.  Later on I realized that the set was a $50 set normally.  My wife being awesome as always… encouraged me to get it… but i felt bad since I had already spent so much earlier.

Things People Pawn

We have always been huge fans of Pawn Shops.  Essentially if I can get a price break by buying something second hand… I will always do it.  Just with the Legos we are always looking for a good deal, and namely we frequently them fairly often looking for Camera lenses for our Canon Digital SLRs.  We had never actually been to the Cash America in Muskogee, but on the last trip my wife actually found where it was located.  So after getting out of Sooner Surplus we wound our way over there to check it out.  It was extremely nice inside and the service staff there were extremely friendly.

That has always been the bane of our existence as pawn shops go.  We go there to buy things, and it always seems like we have pure hell trying to get anyone to wait on us.  The workers in pawn shops are usually either ignoring the customers or too busy with the folks there to pawn things.  It always rubs me the wrong way since in essense we are there to give them money, not ask for it.  Anyways the folks at this shop were the exact opposite super friendly.  My wife looked at some of the rings and I roamed around the store for a bit.  I cracked up when I saw the above items.  I guess people will pawn damned near anything.  I never thought of a generic coffee pot, a igloo water jug, and a toaster oven as high dollar items.

Further Excursions

Another place we have to go whenever we are in Muskogee or honestly any town that has one is Hastings.  For those not familiar with it, it is this odd bookstore/movie/comic/toys/music/electronics store chain.  They generally have prices that range on the high end, but when they put things on sale, or have used merchandise it is generally a really good deal.  Since for the most part we have moved to digital books… I don’t so much buy books there any more, but I love looking through their random geeky kitsch.  One of my favorite things in Borderlands 2… is anything produced by Jacobs manufacturing.  I kind of have a fetish for the whole steam punk look of their weapons.  One of my favorite places in the game is when you run across a non-functioning CL4P-TP model styled by Jacobs.

One the shelves at Hastings I stumbled onto exactly that… a Jacobs model “Clap-Trap”.  I thought it was extremely cool… just not the $20 price tag worth of cool.  Sure it would have looked awesome adorning my desk at work.  But that seemed a bit much for a random action figure.  I had seen several versions of the figure before, but always in the blue or yellow variant.  I didn’t even know that the Jacobs model existed.  I might have gone for it… but the paint job was not nearly as cool as it was in game.  The wood grain looked extremely flat and was mostly just solid fields of brown.  So while super cool… it would never look as cool as the awesome one from in game.

Pretty much the rest of the day was spent ping ponging around Muskogee.  We went out to the Mall and hit several clothing stores looking for stuff for my wife.  Additionally we had trips to Ross and Cato and found a handful of things.  That has been the real challenge this year starting back to school is that since we have both lost quite a bit of weight (55 lbs for me and 45 lbs for my wife) a lot of her professional attire was just too big to remain looking professional.  The frustrating thing is she seems to be in an odd spot where clothing is hard to find… most likely because so many people are currently in that size range.  So as a result we have picked up separates wherever we could find them.

Wrapping Up

It was a fun day, and while it was hot as hell out there it was well worth the trip.  I am so thankful I have such an awesome spouse… that while she may not fully understand my obsessions…  she at least understands what is important to me and indulges my eccentricities.  Quite honestly it is a two way street, as I have gone down so many roads that lead to one of her little obsessions as well.  I guess at the end of the day that is why we work well together.  Anyways… I hope you all have a great weekend, and apologies again for getting this post out so late.